Pausa taking over San Mateo’s Spiedo restaurant site

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This is a rendering from CCS Architecture of the renovation plans for
Pausa Bar & Cookery in downtown San Mateo. The restaurant is going into the
former Spiedo space on East Fourth Avenue. (Illustration courtesy of Pausa)

Two key members of the Bay Area’s Spiedo restaurant team are launching a brand-new Italian concept in that prime downtown San Mateo location.

Restaurateur Steve Ugur, son of the original Spiedo owner, and chef Andrea Giuliani plan to open Pausa Bar & Cookery — the name means “pause” in Italian — as early as December.

Why “pause”?

“Everybody’s so busy now,” Ugur said. “The purpose of our restaurant is to take a pause.”

And when customers do pause inside Pausa — it’s undergoing renovations now — they’ll find a rustic Italian restaurant with not just a wood-burning grill from Tuscany and a pizza oven but also a couple of unusual features: a dough room where they can watch the house-made pastas coming together and a curing chamber where the salumi will be cured and terrines made.

Giuliani’s ambitious plans include making those pastas with specialty flours. One of the likely signature dishes will be cavatelli di grano arso with lamb cheek sugo; the pasta is made with a rare “burnt flour” from Puglia that Giuliani says he was one of the first chefs to use. And he’s looking about launching the menu with a chestnut flour ravioli that may be filled with a fall medley of roasted acorn squash, kale and ricotta cheese.

Much of the fresh produce for the farm-to-table menu will come from Joe Perry Farms in Newark, one of the region’s first organic farms, Giuliani says.

Ugur’s father, Hamdi, opened the original Spiedo — with its trademark mesquite-fired rotisserie — in 1989 on East Fourth Avenue, he says, and the restaurant operated until 2015. The sister Spiedo restaurant at downtown San Jose’s San Pedro Square succumbed to recession pressures in 2009, then reopened before closing again.

Linda Zavoral is a features editor and blogger for the Bay Area News Group She blogs for Eat Drink Play, opining on food, restaurants, libations and travel; edits the popular Mr. Roadshow transportation column; and writes about festivals and events for Eye and Timeout. A Bay Area native, she is a two-time winner of the Lowell Thomas silver medal for best travel section for The Mercury News. She previously served as Alameda County bureau chief and Getting Ahead editor.

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